Do you pay attention to garden trends or do you think they are a pile of baloney? Every year about this time, I read an article telling me what’s in and what’s out. Hot new plants are described. I read that there’s a colour I can’t live without, or that shrubs are making a comeback. (When did they…
Those who can’t garden, read. On grey winter days, nothing beats sitting by a fire and reading garden books. For the last few days, I’ve been devouring Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change. This 2016 publication by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher was top of my Christmas wish list; I’m…
Setting annual goals for the garden keeps me on track and helps me avoid jumping from one thing to another, something I’m all too prone to do. Last year I set 10 goals for myself and discovered, looking back in last week’s post, that ten was too many. So in 2017 I’m cutting my ambitions…
Last December I took the risky step of setting goals for 2016. So as that year ends and 2017 begins, it’s time to assess. How much of what I wanted to do did I actually accomplish? 1. The Cascade: As intended, I modified the plantings around The Cascade. I reduced the number of different types of…
For the last sixteen years I’ve kept a record of what happens each year in the garden. I’ve conscientiously photographed each project I’ve undertaken, each border as it changed from season to season, each modification I made or was thinking about making. I’ve stuck these photographs into albums and written comments — about my intentions for a project, or the weather, what I…
On the weekend we installed the granite slab that marks the ‘front door’ of Orin’s Sugarcamp, my latest art installation at Glen Villa. (You can read about the project here.) Doing this was tricky. It involved transporting an 800-pound slab of rock across a snowy field and a partially frozen stream on the back of an open wagon. That takes…
Is less more? I associate the familiar phrase with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the founders of modern architecture and a proponent of simplicity of style. But when I went to confirm this, I found to my surprise that the phrase was first used in print in Andrea del Sarto, a poem by…
Melvin Charney’s garden made for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal is firmly and unequivocally a city garden. It is surrounded by traffic on all sides, rising up from a piece of land lost between the entry and exit ramps of a busy expressway. It is composed of elements found in many gardens — plants,…
Just over a year ago I began work on a project in the woods at Glen Villa, my garden in Quebec. I was inspired by an exhibition I saw at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in western Massachusetts. One piece in particular caught my eye, a collection of oddly shaped pieces of wood that contrasted in…
No, this isn’t a political post, although governments are involved. The non-political damage that needs to be repaired involves the dam at Glen Villa, my garden in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and the pond the dam created. The pond dates back well over 100 years, to about 1870 or so, when a stream was dammed…